Microsoft belatedly attempts to use friends and family to get rid of Windows XP

With less than two months to go, it's a bit late to ask people to upgrade.

Windows XP drops out of support on April 8. From that date it will no longer receive any fixes for security problems found in the operating system. Security researchers and hackers alike will, however, continue to find security flaws in the operating system beyond that date. It's likely that some unfixed flaws will become public almost immediately after April 8, as patches for other, supported versions of Windows—especially Windows Server 2003—will betray the existence of Windows XP bugs.

In spite of this, Windows XP remains in widespread use, be it to power your doctor's medical record system or the information displays at the airport, or be it on your parents' occasionally used but not quite retired PC. By some measures, about 30 percent of the Web-using world is on Windows XP.

Any organization with a proper IT department knows that Windows XP is on the way out. They might not all have done anything in response, perhaps hoping that Microsoft will offer an 11th-hour reprieve and support extension, or they might have decided to pay Redmond large sums of money for private support, but they do at least know that there's an issue.

The same does not appear to be true of many home users. From our perspective, Microsoft has done little to inform these Windows users that there's a problem. The company is now calling for technically minded folk—the kind who read the official Windows Experience blog—to upgrade their friends and family to Windows 8.1.

Two paths are suggested: upgrade PCs that can meet the Windows 8.1 specs, replace ones that can't.

The post also highlights the difficulties in actually doing this. There's no upgrade path from Windows XP to Windows 8.1, so the "upgrade" requires reinstalling every piece of software and restoring all data from backup—a process that's, at best, enormously tedious and time-consuming. The PC industry would no doubt love for everyone using Windows XP to buy new systems, but it's too late for that now anyway. There are too many Windows XP machines and not enough time to replace them all.

If Microsoft wanted to reach out to home users to get them to upgrade or replace Windows XP machines, the time to do so was probably two years ago, not less than two months before the operating system drops out of support. Moreover, it needed to be far more aggressive: a direct upgrade solution from Windows XP is probably a necessary evil, and some kind of "cash for clunkers" incentive scheme to replace old PCs was probably also necessary. The Windows XP situation is a mess. Extending support (as the company has done for the Security Essentials anti-malware software) isn't a solution, as it would just make the mess last even longer, with little evidence that the extra time would be used for the necessary migrations.

All we can do now is hope that nothing important using Windows XP is on the 'net, and that it'll be someone else's medical records that get compromised, not our own.

Doing any kind of update from XP to W8.x would have been a mess. A clean install is the only way to go. Most light users should probably be able to find what they need in the app store for free or near free.

They could, you know, offer reduced price licenses for Windows 8.1 for those people still on Windows XP... That might help.

No, then they will try and install it on their 2003 vintage P4 with as whopping 512mb of ram and blames winders 8 when it all goes horribly wrong.

I can't speak as to Windows 8, but I've installed Windows 7 x86 on an old P4 2.4 GHz with 2 Gig of PC3200, and it was surprisingly up to the moderate web-surfing, email, and wordprocessing that the user expected.

Of course a year later some caps on the mobo went, so I got to rebuild the system with a Core3 and 4 gigs of DDR3-1333.

We are still largely XP at work, with plans to migrate to 7 this year. It's a real issue, but we switched from IE6 to IE8 last year if anyone doesn't believe corporations are really slow to upgrade.

Good luck to you. You and your company are about to get raped.

I appreciate your concern, and we are 30% Windows 7 or so. One thing that'll be interesting is that we have an internal information security department that is pretty serious about security and can determine our policy.

I'm curious if they set strict policies, such as no internet access and no program installation policy for all XP computers.

My company replaced all the desktops and moved to Windows 7 last year so I'm just sitting back and watching you guys fall. Not really, because I work for a software company and I'm going to have to deal with a raft of misdirected customer complaints about XP not being supported by Microsoft anymore. Why? customers never seem to be able to figure out which software is the problem so they just call us.

I kept looking for an actual argument or description of some kind in that rant, but didn't find one. I suspect the description of what actually happened in Update 1 is somewhere else on that site? Note: Windows 7 user.

Sorry, Microsoft, you lied about Skype privacy and sold out everyone to the NSA.

You'll never get another penny from me.

Show me one major that wasn't compromised. LMAO.

Microsoft was the first to sign up with the NSA. The NSA is deeply embedded with Microsoft, and vice versa, much more so than Google or Apple. Almost all foreign corporations and governments use Windows, that's the motive. Sure, they use Google, but it is much easier to choose not to use Google, than it is Microsoft.

Our system admin was able to perform an in place upgrade from vista to windows 7 about a year back. It would be a little harder from Xp to 7, but if you have the same machine types (limited set of hardware and drivers to test), I imagine you could do an in place upgrade over night.

Extending support... isn't a solution, as it would just make the mess last even longer, with little evidence that the extra time would be used for the necessary migrations.

From the perspective of PC owners, it isn't a "mess". The PC is perfectly functional, so it's quite understandable that many of them don't want to spend more money or reinstall everything - with unpredictable results. Extending support would let many of them replace the PC when it breaks or gets too slow (i.e. when you have to do it anyway).

Perhaps one day soon, competition will force MS to give away a vanilla version of Windows OS for free (like Chrome OS), or for a very small fee of $10/year. I can see that happening.

[Edit]I don't understand the down votes. To clarify, this would be completely different from paying $90 for XP or any OS version. First of all, the cost is spread out. Second of all, you can stop paying and switch to a different OS if you are not satisfied. That gives MS the incentive to keep you happy through out. Lastly, you will continue to get the latest OS version, features, and patches. How is that not better than paying $130-$150 for an OEM Windows 8 today? Besides, as I said, MS could give it away for free and make money on Office, devices, and AppStore fees, etc. I don't see why not.

I just finished an XP-->8 migration for a family member. Found them a nice Lenovo all-in-one for $400 to replace their circa 2003 laptop. They are amazed at how fast a new computer can be (they basically had no idea that new computers can be had so cheaply after paying $1500 for their old one).

The most time consuming aspect was installing Classicshell and making the new computer look like the old computer (which it looks like MS will address with the upcoming Win8.1 patch).

My company is still on Win XP for the most part, and likely will not be fully migrated to Windows 7 before Microsoft's already announced Mainstream EOL date of 1/13/2015. Allegedly, they paid a ton of money to Microsoft for "private" support for XP through the end of 2014.

Windows 8 did me the favor Vista couldn't. Now I have a desktop running Saucy Salamander in addition to my laptop on 12.04 LTS. Unlike the laptop, which dual-boots in Windows 7, the desktop is essentially Microsoft-free, and I'm loving it. Cinnamon is beautiful, and Wine works fine for my modest gaming usage.

I might throw an XP on the desktop too as well, just to see what the doom-and-gloom is about. I don't expect any serious problems.

Sorry, Microsoft, you lied about Skype privacy and sold out everyone to the NSA.

You'll never get another penny from me.

Show me one major that wasn't compromised. LMAO.

Tell me why that means I should want to give money to any of them.

Because being on an unsupported OS is silly.

Switch to linux if you prefer. But to remain on XP is foolish.

If you've already done so, then your post wasn't appropriate for the thread.

I was only supporting the original poster's decision not to give money to MS. If you really think all MS software is bugged, you should have switched off of Windows Anything 8 months ago. And in light of PRISM and the NSAKey thing from a few years back, that's probably a good assumption.

Those old XP boxes would probably make great Linux computers. Just pick a lean distro.

For our office, we should be unaffected as, we ditched almost all of our Windows computers, before Vista hit the market. (My last Windows box was XP-64.) I was forced to work on a Windows computer for a few days, a short time ago. I was surprised at how lost I was.

99% off of it as of jan 1. 1 damn machine has to remain on XP due to ancient door/elevator system, but it has been banished to a set of it's own switches.

We've got quite a few chemistry acquisition servers on XP, that need to stay on that OS to drive the instruments they are connected to. The software for the instruments is XP-only.

Short of spending a million dollars on new R&D instruments, XP is here to stay.

Even worse, the data on those machines is mission-critical, so needs to be backed up properly. After a lot of consternation, we have ended up having to provision a whole separate XP VLAN to segment that traffic on its own little legacy (non-internet-connected) network.

The crazy part will be when we end up needing to replace the XP-based acquisition servers. The instruments still have a good decade of life in them, so I can imagine a poor ICT Manager here in a decade trying to track down hardware that runs XP, just to keep them chugging along.

I kept looking for an actual argument or description of some kind in that rant, but didn't find one. I suspect the description of what actually happened in Update 1 is somewhere else on that site? Note: Windows 7 user.

I gave my mother an old computer with XP. It's about 10 years old, but more than enough for her needs. It works great and is pretty responsive considering its age. I see no reason to spend time and money to change that setup. If it ain't broke, don't try to fix it.

Just don't come crying to us when it's full of malware and her online banking has been compromised.

Our system admin was able to perform an in place upgrade from vista to windows 7 about a year back. It would be a little harder from Xp to 7, but if you have the same machine types (limited set of hardware and drivers to test), I imagine you could do an in place upgrade over night.

Nope.

Vista, 7, and 8 are very different from XP. You could just, kinda, upgrade from XP to Vista, but XP to 7? Nope. XP to 8 is right out. Too many compatibility problems, too many settings differences, any attempt to do a straight upgrade would result in a frankenmonster machine that uses hacks and tricks to try and keep everything working the same as XP, If you want to upgrade XP to a 64-bit version of Windows then it's even worse, as so much change underneath that Microsoft has said that it simply cannot be done.

I gave my mother an old computer with XP. It's about 10 years old, but more than enough for her needs. It works great and is pretty responsive considering its age. I see no reason to spend time and money to change that setup. If it ain't broke, don't try to fix it.

But it is broke, that's the whole problem. XP's security model is fundamentally unsound, and the only thing that keeps the entire internet from devouring an XP machine are the regular patches from Microsoft that mitigate new threats as they're found. In a few months the patches stop, and your machine is now vulnerable to every new exploit found.

To use a car analogy: You've given your mom a 10-year-old car. It runs well enough, but in a few months it will become impossible to ever change its oil, replace its brake pads, replace/rotate its tires, or do any other maintenance or repair work on it. While it'll still be usable past that cut-off date, it also won't be "not broke" for very long.